Keep off my ancestral domain

I don’t necessarily pay attention to what Juan S. Pangelinan writes about, but occasionally he makes comments that bother the subjects of his prose. If he had changed his name to John, then I stand corrected for his identity was always known to me as Juan. His point that I called Gregorio C. Sablan a liar, that is true. His point that I write with a passion about the rights of the indigenous people of the Northern Mariana Islands as an issue, that is also true.

The liar in Gregorio C. Sablan’s psyche is the half-truth that he posits by grabbing public domain matters that do not belong to his circle of ownership. We are reminded that in politics the lows are lower than the highs are high. In other words, when politicians mess up, the size of the damage they cause is larger than the size of the benefit they create when they do well.

If one understands, learns, and recognizes that the indigenous people of the Northern Mariana Islands possess their own identity rooted in historical factors, then the common ground is set for legitimate and deliberative discussions about this issue. By virtue of the indigenous people of the NMI’s existence, they do have a natural and original right to live freely on their lands.

As an indigenous person in the NMI, my ancestral domain is important to me, and that I could not change. This is deeper than the skin that covers my body and soul, and have unexplained meaning that disenfranchised the psychology of the like of Juan S. Pangelinan and Gregorio C. Sablan because they deny their past. Their view about the very people that made them who they today is troubling to those who brands these islands as belonging to the indigenous people. One that has no clue about the ancestral domain of the indigenous people of the NMI would have no meaning whatsoever deliberating what the indigenous people encountered preserving these islands for their generations and in writing the history of the future of these islands.

Gregorio C. Sablan is imprisoning the indigenous people of the NMI by his position that later settlers of these islands have superior rights to wipe out the existence of the very people that made these islands what they are today. Why imprisonment and how this relates to the point of discussions here? Who is better to tell us about imprisonment than other than Juan S. Pangelinan? Raising the point about “racism” by Juan S. Pangelinan is like saying that the judge who put him in prison for his dishonesty and falsehood is racist because the judge did not agree with his defense. In the case of Gregorio C. Sablan, pushing the indigenous people aside in order to make room for temporary settlers on these islands is the imprisonment that the indigenous people pay for keeping this man as a representative of their wellbeing. When the indigenous people are robbed of their ancestral domain, what sentence worse than the death penalty would that amount to? A prison has four walls that are designed to take away the liberty of the offender, and Juan S. Pangelinan knows this well. What Gregorio C. Sablan posits with respect to the CW is the same as saying that taking away the liberty of the “indigenous people of the NMI” is okay.

Therefore, the likes of Juan S. Pangelinan and Gregorio C. Sablan is one of the same, whether we see it from the front side or the back side. The cue to what Gregorio C. Sablan is doing is the “Trojan horse” and the hidden agenda that politics embeds in their works. The suspicion is real and we need to talk about it, and Mr. Gregorio C. Sablan should be the star of the forum.

Francisco R. Agulto
Kannat Tabla, Saipan